May 21, 2017: Festa Trail

Nine years ago, I ran a 18 km race in the hills north of Montpellier, France, part of a big three-day festival of races called Festa Trail. I have good memories of the event. The weather was great, it was more runnable than Trail Quillan, and one of the race organizers emailed me the day after I posted to express interest in my blog post. I had some leg cramps at Festa Trail. Cramping is the subject of my next blog post, and scanning my previous posts for mention of cramps is what reminded me of my run around Pic St-Loup. My first trail race was in Colorado, but running in France really got me hooked. The runners were super enthusiastic, the villages we ran through provided food, drink, and music, the courses were crazy steep and technical or very sloppy. Adventures, but safe ones, because the pompiers (firefighters and first responders) were always on the scene. The events were big! Hundreds or thousands of runners at some of them. In the years since, I've heard French people say…